Wesley Fenlon | Not with a bang but a whimper.

I’d heard good things about Stranger’s Wrath.  The Oddworld series was genuinely well-regarded for its take on classic struggles against oppression featuring wacky characters, and Stranger’s Wrath received similar acclaim for being a standout in the crowd of shooters.  I picked it up on the cheap, only to discover that, like far too many excellent games, it’s not playable on the Xbox 360.  To the dusty shelf it went, pushed aside but not forgotten.

As part of my Winter Break Game-a-thon, I commandeered the old beefy Xbox from one of my roommates for the express purpose of playing Stranger’s Wrath.  Hopes were high, enthusiasm was piqued, sugary confections were consumed.

I wasn’t ready for what was in store.

The game was interesting, refreshing, and fun from the beginning.  By the end, it was incredible.  As I reflect on it, I’m convinced that Oddworld: Stranger’s Wrath is one of the most perfectly designed videogames I’ve ever played.

What makes Stranger’s Wrath amazing isn’t that any one aspect of the game is genre-defining, jaw-dropping or blow-your-mind incredible.  It’s how Oddworld Inhabitants brought everything together into a delicate, perfectly-arranged experience.  Despite their penchant for narrative, you can tell Stranger’s Wrath was designed from the ground up to really be a game — the key concept of progression controls the flow of the game, briskly moving you along from one world hub to the next as soon as you’ve fully explored an area.  Character, equipment, and weapon upgrades come in a steady flow, and each ammo type changes in usefulness significantly at some point in the game, offering you incentive to mix up your play style and experiment with new combinations.  Backtracking is completely eliminated — if you be movin’, you be movin’ forward.  Each area manages to be visually unique without falling into the cliche of a fire level, an ice level, a forest level, yada yada.  Even the story follows along, evolving as it plays out and ending in a place considerably different than where it began.

One of the very few complaints I could make is that the story moved past its western aesthetic in the last third of the game, which was somewhat of a shame.  In essence, it became Stranger’s odyssey, but I was thoroughly enjoying myself in Stranger’s wild west adventure.

Oddworld Inhabitants completely embraced a linchpin of good design I wrote about at length in the past: choice.  There are almost ten different types of living forms of ammunition, including the expected real-world equivalents of machine guns, shotguns, and grenade launchers.  But when you throw in oddballs like skunks that cause everybody in the vicinity to drop what they’re doing and commence blowing chunks, and chipmunks who throw anyone with eardrums into a blind and vulnerable rage, good times are obviously about to be had.  And on top of that, there’s those upgrades for each type of ammo.

And the choices don’t stop there.  Really, that’s where they begin.  Capturing enemies for extra moolah is completely voluntary; the same applies to bounties, who are generally much easier to outright slaughter than stun and capture.  Stranger’s Wrath smoothly switches from third to first person in a mockery of lesser games that can’t even handle one of the two.

Finally, the game is just brimming with life.  Characters are animated and expressive, and the voices perfectly suit each character or race.  Stranger’s slow drawl is generally hilarious, the chickens are all rednecks, and the Grubb’s are easily some of the funniest characters in gaming history — just getting to hear them is reason enough to sacrifice the western aesthetic and embrace the latter portion of the adventure.  Duuude, Steef!

If you like videogames, you need to play Stranger’s Wrath.  It’s practically a textbook on effective game design and a winning recipe for fun.